A few years back, my wife and I were at a party. It wasn’t quite a dinner party because it wasn’t a formal, sit-down dinner. The host prepared some appetizers for us and we all just picked, and drank, and talked. I hate the expression “good vibes”, but that’s really what it was. A good group of people enjoying each other’s company.
My wife’s friend, the hostess of the “not quite a dinner” party, has a daughter. At the time, the little girl was around three. Her name is Ruth, but everyone calls her Ru. About an hour after Ru went to bed, she did what kids tend to do when their parents have people over. She came downstairs. In her hands was a bizarre stuffed animal. It was a plush cactus in a little planter. The cactus had big eyes and a little smile. “Mommy, I want to show everyone my toy.” Ru, with her cute little chubby belly that stuck out of her Frozen pajama set, put the cactus on the ground, pressed a button, and started to dance while the cactus toy danced along with her to some early 2000’s hip hop song that was too hard to hear through it’s internal speaker. The party let out a collective laugh and people started clapping and cheering Ru on while she bounced around the kitchen island. After the laughter died down, Ru announced to her mini audience, “That’s not all he does.” She pressed another button and then spoke “Say hi to everyone Mr. Cactus.” The cactus, in an over-modulated chipmunk voice repeated “say hi to everyone Mr. cactus”. Ru nearly exploded with giggles and held the toy above her head. Her mom said to the party, “the stupid thing records your voice and plays it back”. Everyone took turns saying goofy things to the cactus and listening to it repeat the statements in a squeaky, high-pitched voice.
I drank too much that night, as most of us probably did, and completely forgot about that cactus until three years later when my wife bought one for our one year old daughter, Phoebe.
I came home from work one night last week. Most nights, I walk in through the back door, throw my stuff on the dining room table, give my wife a kiss and pick up the baby. Phoebe is getting so funny now. She can walk a little; she takes a couple steps and falls down on her diapered butt. We get a kick out of her interacting with us. Her new thing recently has been dancing. She loves to dance to music on the radio or even theme songs from her favorite shows. She wiggles back and forth with a huge smile on her face and we can’t stop from laughing. I think that’s why Stephanie bought that dancing cactus for her. She thought Phoebe would dance along with it.
Like I said, I came home from work a little over a week ago and found Steph and Phoebe sitting in the living room, hovering over the dancing cactus. It was playing a DMX song and Phoebe was just staring at it. She wasn’t sure what to make of the thing. Steph told me it had just come from Amazon and she couldn’t wait to open it for the baby to see her reaction. She immediately posted a video to Instagram of Phoebe staring at it apprehensively while the thing wiggled it’s arms and played “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas. Still holding my work bag, I watched as Phoebe babbled and screeched at it and the cactus repeated her noises right back to her. For the moment, it was cute, but I knew the novelty would wear off and the dancing cactus would eventually end up collecting dust in her toy chest.
I guess I should mention that Phoebe is our first child. We were pretty nervous parents in the beginning. Steph’s mom and dad live in Ann Arbor. We don’t see them much. I think that’s the way Steph likes it. My parents are a bit more involved and it’s good to have them close because they enjoy watching Phoebe on date nights. It was during one of those date nights where the problems with the dancing cactus started.
We had the cactus for four days, and as I suspected, the novelty wore off pretty quickly. We played around with it for the first day or so and then we forgot about it. It sat in her pack-and-play until my mom came to watch Phoebe last Friday night. Steph and I went to one of our favorite BYOBs after I got off work. We brought two bottles of one, white for Steph and red for me. I think it was after our entrees had been delivered that I got a text from my mom asking how to turn the cactus toy off. She said it kept making strange noises and she was trying to put the baby down. I told her that the on/off button was next to where you put the batteries in so she had to go into the junk drawer and get my mini screwdriver to turn it off.
Steph and I got home at around 10. We were both overly stuffed and a little buzzed, well, maybe more than a little buzzed. We plopped down on the couch and Steph asked my mom how the baby was for her. She told us that everything went well, but she was still having problems with the dancing cactus, “so I just put it in the garage because the damn thing won’t stop making noises.” We tried to explain to her that when it isn’t playing music, then it will repeat what you say to it. Maybe it was hearing what she was saying to the baby and just repeating her. “Well I had the hardest time with that little screw driver,” she said, “so I couldn’t get it turned off. Besides, I wasn’t talking to it at all. I was just watching TV with the volume turned down so I wouldn’t wake the baby.”
I eventually walked mom out to her car and thanked her for watching Phoebe. Steph and I went to bed. Well, we had sex and then went to bed, but I’m going to keep that part to myself.
It was just after 3:00 AM that Steph woke me up out of my wine-fueled sleep and told me she kept hearing a noise. At first, I thought maybe we were getting some kind of feedback from the baby monitor, but I put it up to my ear and could only hear the gentle static and the hum of the white noise machine in Phoebe’s nursery. And then I heard it: an odd noise coming from somewhere in the house. I jumped out of bed and started walking through the house, checking each room. It wasn’t until I go to the landing that I realized it was coming from somewhere on the first floor.
I think I knew it was the cactus right away, but your mind has a tough time trying to rationalize when you’ve been woken up out of a dead sleep. I checked the locks on the front and back doors. It was when I checked that the garage door was locked that I heard the dancing cactus. It said something from inside of the garage, but it was garbled. I opened the door that led to the garage, flicked on the light, and saw the thing sitting motionless on the ground next to the recycling bins. I stared at it, willing it to say something again. It stared right back at me.
“Babe,” Steph called from the top of the stairs. I jumped at the sound of her voice. I called back to her that it was just the cactus toy and I’ll be back up in a minute.
She said something else, but I didn’t hear her. The cactus spoke again. As it did many times before during those first few days, the arms of the cactus wiggled and the colored lights inside it’s long, plush body blinked. Only this time, it didn’t repeat what I had just said. It spoke directly to me.
“My baby.”
That was the first night it spoke to us, but it wasn’t the last. We’ve had three days of the dancing cactus talking to us. One day when I was at work and Steph was home with Phoebe, the dancing cactus turned itself on and Steph swears she heard it say, “Phoebe girl.” That’s one of the many nicknames we’ve given her since she was born. Two nights ago I woke up to get a bottle of water from the kitchen. Steph had left the cactus on the buffet table. For some reason we both couldn’t articulate, we never wanted the thing too far away from us. I think it’s the same reason we didn’t take the batteries out. It’s like we want to know what it’s going to say next. So that night I went to get a drink and it said to me, “back to bed.”
Steph has a theory that it’s like one of those ghost box things you see on ghost hunting shows. She thinks maybe there’s a spirit in the house that is using the dancing cactus to communicate with us. My theory is that the toy is defective and its just picking up things that we say and repeating them back to us after a longer period of time. Although, I can’t remember saying “back to bed” recently.
It’s in the garage right now. I can hear it going off every few minutes or so. We’ve heard it say a few different words or phrases since it started talking, but tonight it seems stuck on, “my baby”. I think we’re going to have Phoebe sleep with us tonight.